Hello World

My name is James Patrick Gordon. Typically, I do my blogging here. This blog constitutes my Film Notebook for an undergraduate course I'm taking- Posthumanism in Science Fiction, led by Dan Dinello at Columbia College Chicago. On this blog, I'm going to talk about films listed as required texts for the course. Comments are welcome, but understand that I may not be able to respond to all of them (unless, of course, you happen to be Professor Dinello).

Thank you, and enjoy!

The Matrix

The Matrix, released in 1999 by Warner Bros. Pictures, was the first entry in what would become a major film and media franchise. The movie follows the story of Thomas Anderson (also known as Neo), a computer programmer and part-time hacker who finds himself entangled with a shadowy underground figure known as Morpheus. After months of late-night internet searches and a tense run-in with mysterious men in dark suits known only as Agents, Neo is finally brought before Morpheus. Neo is told that the world he knows is a lie, and that he has a choice between learning the truth and forgetting this whole episode ever happened. Neo chooses the truth, and after taking a red pill and being subjected to an odd procedure, Neo wakes up in a sarcophagus filled with amniotic good, with wires and cords protruding from his body. A massive robot drone appears and violently removes the wires and flushes him into a series of waste disposal pipes. Eventually, he's rescued by a ship, piloted by Morpheus.
On board, Neo learns that the world he knew is a lie- a virtual reality construct known as the Matrix. At some point in the past, humanity found itself on the losing side of a war with sentient machines of their own design- a war which ravaged the planet and found humanity subjugated and enslaved by the machines. Since then, the machines have imprisoned humans from birth to death in pods, wired to massive bio-electrical energy conduits that powers their machine society. To placate the enslaved humans, their brains are jacked in to a virtual environment mimicking human society in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Morpheus and his retinue represent the last vestiges of a human resistance movement- people who have managed to free themselves from the Matrix and live in the “real world.” The rest of the movie follows Neo's journey of self-discovery, as a prophecy about him is revealed- one that could change the terms of the conflict between Man and Machine.
The Matrix can almost be described as a philosophical thought experiment. Its central themes draw on epistemological thought, with several oblique references to Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” as well as Descartes' Meditations. In particular, the epistemological reflections on how we know what we know is illustrated when Morpheus asks Neo, “What is real? How do you define real?” These ideas also dovetail with Gnostic philosophy and belief, which says (in part) that the world we live in is an illusion, a dream that followers spend their lives trying to wake up from. Christian imagery also appears, as the story features a prophecy (apparently pertaining to Neo) of a human Messiah figure who will end the ongoing war against the machines and bring freedom to humanity.
The film was released during a part of my life when I was fairly impressionable. As such, the themes and imagery in the film resonated with me. In particular, one of the themes that I really connected with was the question of Self and Identity, and how mutable it really is. I also spent a lot of time after I saw the film thinking about the nature of freedom- how much of it was “real” and how much was an illusion we construct. I was also struck by the blending of technology and spirituality- in fact, that's when I first started exploring the space where the two overlap through my writing, art, and other work. The idea of living things as initialized code, of the world as a computer program, of our senses as a user interface... this was all pretty deep stuff when I was 17.

Bride of Frankenstein

Bride of Frankenstein was produced in 1935 by Universal Pictures. A follow-up to James Whale's previous horror classic Frankenstein (1931), the movie opens immediately following the conclusion of its preceding film. As a gathered mob rejoices over the apparent death of The Monster, its creator, Henry Frankenstein, collapses and appears to be near-death. As he's whisked away to his castle, an old man and his wife remain by the incident site after the crowd disperses. Insisting that he'll only feel at peace once he sees the Monster's corpse for himself, he lowers himself into the pit where it fell. There, he finds the Monster- but far from dead. It kills the old man, and his wife waiting above, before stealing away into the forest.

Meanwhile, Henry recovers, and is anxious to put the incident behind him. Days before his plan to elope with his fiancée Elizabeth, he's approached by his former mentor, Dr. Pretorius. He tries to convince Henry to partner with him and continue his work, believing that together they can unlock the secrets of life and immortality. He's turned down at first, but returns later in the film with new leverage- the Monster, who he captured in the forest following several months on the run. When even this revelation fails to shake Henry's resolve, Pretorius orders the Monster to kidnap Elizabeth. In light of this, Henry finally agrees to work with Pretorius, and together they recreate Henry's original experiment and construct a new Monster, intended as a mate for the original. When the Monster first approaches the Bride, she shrieks in terror and recoils from him. Enraged and dejected, the Monster goes on a rampage, destroying the laboratory and killing everyone present- save for Henry and Elizabeth, who the Monster permits to escape.

The central theme of the film is technology and the consequences that ensue when humanity tries to meddle with nature. We see this most potently with the Monster- assembled from the parts of various human corpses, animated with electricity, having but the most rudimentary of mental faculty. Originally hailed as a triumph of life over death, it's ultimately seen as an abomination and a horror once it becomes apparent that the Monster (which acts more out of fear and loneliness than anything else) cannot be controlled. The film also deals heavily with Christian imagery, particularly with the image of the Monster as a Resurrected figure. Allusions to Christ's Passion, shots of the Monster in cruciform poses, and other references make stark comparisons to the Gospel. The story draws its distinctions, however, by pointing out that the creature was made by Man, and is thus deficient and incapable of ever replicating the grace that Man received from God.

While for the most part this use of Christian imagery solidly reinforced the themes of the film, I felt it was a bit distracting. Mainly, I felt the film kept trying to start a theological reflection that it simply wasn't prepared to follow through on. Indeed, whatever deeper implications the Monster-As-Resurrected-Figure brought with him were dampened by a near-complete lack of self-determination on the Monsters part. The events of the story largely happen to him, rather than being driven by him, and even his noble self-sacrifice at the end comes too little and too late. This relegates the Monster to a set-piece, a MacGuffin, but not a true actor in the story- which unfortunately serves as a cop-out from fully exploring the ramifications of having a Modern Prometheus in the world. But then again, the film was only 75 minutes long.